IGN: One of your key concerns is pushing storytelling ahead in videogames. Aside from your own games, what have been the best examples of this to date?

David Cage: I have very few examples to name to be honest. There are some fantastic games out there, but very few pay attention to storytelling because it's considered not to be an important part of the experience. Videogames are about pressing buttons as quickly as possible, about getting adrenaline and excitement, and creating a fun experience. I always name the same games – I like the games of Fumito Ueda – Ico and Shadow of the Colossus – he is a real artist, a real author, and is probably one of the very few ones in our industry, but he's really got a world of his own, his own vision and this strange poetry which I really enjoy. He can create different types of emotions, not just adrenaline and excitement, but he can create empathy, he can create sadness – and that's very interesting. I'm unable to do what he does in the way that he does it is totally unique, but I think we think along the same lines.

Some rain, presumably the heavy sort.

IGN: Ueda's one of the few people in the industry – alongside people like Kojima and yourself as well – who is identified as an auteur within videogames. But making videogames is something so reliant on technology and large numbers of people – is it possible to have individual visions in big budget videogames?

David Cage: It's very difficult – in order to do this I had to create my own company and be the boss. I'm not just the author, I'm also running the company so I can put everything in line with what I want to achieve, and the company becomes my tool to create what I want to create. It's a very strange word because when you're a writer, you're on your own – you've got a piece of paper, a pen, yourself and then you write, you don't need to consider anyone else. When you make a movie it's a little more complex because there's more people involved, but when you make a game like Heavy Rain it's 200 people spread through the world over three years, so you need to make sure that everybody understands the vision, and that the vision is still there once these 200 people have done what they're supposed to do. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy not to get diluted in the process, to not get diluted in technology – because very often you try to build things that are technically great, but it's not the focus, which is the experience and the emotion. You need to streamline everybody and make sure they go in the same direction.

IGN: Cinema took years before it established a language of storytelling – how far are videogames away from doing the same thing?

David Cage: I think we do everything faster. The problem is that there are very few people trying to do this at the moment in the industry. I think it could go very fast if there were more people working on this.

IGN: But you've said before that while technology progresses really fast in videogames, the ideas behind them take a lot longer to move on.

David Cage: You know there's something a little strange about our industry – you know Moore's Law, about processors doubling their power every 18 months? I think the processor power progresses much faster than people's ideas. We are in a very conservative industry, which is quite surprising because one might think that people are full of new ideas – but that's not the case. We're very conservative, and we still stick to rules that were defined 20 years ago, and it's really difficult to get people to say 'You know what, yes you can define a mission in a level with enemies and rewards and stuff, but maybe there's another way to do this'. There are very few people experimenting with these things, you've got these rules and no-one dares to change them. But rules are here to be changed.

The facial animation in Heavy Rain is beyond compare.

I love games like Flower, for example – I thought this was amazing, it's great, it's new, it's different and it's invented something that didn't exist before. Even stuff like Katamari Damacy – that's really fun and it's a new idea, but really there are no new ideas out there, and a lot of people make the same games again and again and again – and I'm a little bored of that to be honest. I think we will go faster than cinema in inventing this language, first because cinema was there before and we can borrow a lot from them. It doesn't mean we should copy them, but we should just borrow some codes because some of their codes are valid for us – and others aren't. But it's the same way that we can borrow from cinema, cinema borrowed from photography which borrowed from painting etc. Nothing is created from scratch.

IGN: But is it possible for videogames to have their own language which is entirely separate from cinema?

David Cage: Nothing is created from scratch, ever. You always have to borrow codes from other media, and at the same time you need to invent new things, new grammar in this new language. This is exactly what we're trying to achieve. Heavy Rain is just the first step in this direction. We borrow from movies, we borrow from TV series, we borrow from writing – we borrow from different types of media, and we try to add our own words in this language.

IGN: Can some of the techniques used in Heavy Rain be applied in other videogames?

David Cage: Yes, because we wrote Heavy Rain not so much as one single game but rather like a format. In fact, with the grammar of Heavy Rain you can tell pretty much any kind of story. You could write a comedy, you could write a musical you could write a cartoon using exactly the same language and the same breaks. We can tell any story. This is what is really interesting about it, and we want to explore in the future how we can tell different stories with the same grammar.

Scott Shelby takes down a robber, an episode that can play out in numerous different ways.

IGN: With photorealism drawing ever nearer – and Heavy Rain gets closer than most – where do you think the next level of immersion is going to be?

David Cage: I don't think that photorealism is required to offer emotions. You can have very abstract characters and renderings offering the same type of emotions – look at Pixar movies, they're not photorealistic they're stylised, and it doesn't prevent emotion from happening. I don't think that that's an end in itself – I just thought it was the best rendering for the story I wanted to tell, but this is not something I'm going to stick to in the future, whether it's Quantic Dream or something else, I don't think it's required to create emotion.

IGN: Obviously your head is full with Heavy Rain at the moment, but where next for Quantic Dream?

David Cage: My head starts to be full of my next project too. It's important that as a designer I need to think a step ahead of where the team is because I need to prepare the ground for them. But at the same time, what I'm going to discover when releasing Heavy Rain is going to be very important for me and for projects in the future, about what we did right and how it was perceived by gamers. So we work on new ideas and projects, but I always keep an eye on what's going on and be ready to change when needed.